In recent years, enterprises have shifted much of their computing needs from enterprise owned and operated computer systems to cloud computing providers. Cloud computing providers charge enterprises to store and run their applications in a cloud-computing facility and allow enterprises to purchase other computing services in much the same way utility customers purchase a service from a public utility. A typical, cloud-computing facility is composed of numerous racks of servers, switches, routers, and mass data-storage devices interconnected by local-area networks, wide-area networks, and wireless communications that may be consolidated into a single data center or distributed geographically over a number of data centers. Enterprises typically run their applications in a cloud-computing facility as virtual machines (“VMs”) that are consolidated into a virtual data center (“VDC”) also called a software defined data center (“SDDC”). A VDC recreates the architecture and functionality of a physical data center for running an enterprise's applications. For example, VDCs typically include a virtual infrastructure of logical disks (“LDs”) to store data objects created by the VMs. A LD is a virtual data-storage device that provides an area of usable storage capacity on one or more physical disk drives. A LD may be described as virtual because the LD does not actually exist as a physical entity, but appears to the VMs as a physical data-storage device. Because the vast numbers of VDCs and dynamic nature of VDCs running in a typical cloud-computing facility, VDC's introduce management challenges to information technology (“IT”) managers.
As the demand for data storage by VMs increases, storage utilization by VMs has become increasingly significant. In particular, determining storage cost associated with each VM in a VDC has become a significant and challenging part of determining the overall cost of each VM. As a result, IT managers seek systems and methods to determine storage cost for VMs in a VDC, that take into account the various storage capacities and capabilities of the LDs.